Grant Morrison’s Batman, Inc. Births Comics’ First Zen Billionaire

Writer Grant Morrison is betting the house on franchising The Dark Knight's deathless brand in his new comic book series, Batman, Inc. But is 21st-century capitalism ready for Earth's finest Zen billionaire?

"Batman, Inc. is the idea that we can all be Batman, if we want to," the acclaimed Scotland-born comics writer told Wired.com by phone. "Batman travels the world recruiting new Bat-men and stamping them with his seal of approval."

Given the superhero's straight-edge persona, indefatigable work ethic and bottomless billions, his new Bat-capitalists should be light-years away from the corporate egotists heavily stroked in films like Iron Man 2, whose Tony Stark is a self-obsessed screw-up compared to Bruce Wayne's solemn justice-seeker.

But you get what you pay for, said Morrison, whose Batman, Inc. debuts Nov. 17. "It's a natural development, and just shows what we're into nowadays," he said. "Playboys who can do anything they want."

Morrison's storied run on comics' timeless human superhero has dragged Batman through the apocalyptic depths of space and time. He killed and rebooted him in Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis. In Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, he tasked the Dark Knight with Herculean challenges usually reserved for immortals like Superman.

Along the way, Morrison has added to a stacked back catalog of stunning work, including Animal Man, Doom Patrol, The Invisibles, The Filth and Seaguy. The comics have made Morrison a hot commodity in Hollywood, with strange films like We3, Joe the Barbarian and Sinatoro in development, and other projects on the way: All-Star Superman, the first animated feature based on Morrison's brilliant comics, arrives next winter. Patrick Meaney's Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods, the first documentary to study the legendary storyteller, premiered at New York Comic-Con.

Wired.com: Is there a connection between your series Batman, Inc. and the corporatism that's running a bit wild in the 21st century?

Grant Morrison: Yeah, there's a little bit of that. I got the idea looking back through my Batman research, and suddenly there was the Batman symbol from Tim Burton's film. And I found it interesting because it was one of the biggest merchandising symbols in history, and it really sold that movie. But it also looked like a gaping mouth. [Laughs] It made the Batman symbol a giant, gobbling capitalist. So I wanted to take that branding and put it in the hands of Batman himself.

Wired.com: What inspired this approach?

Morrison: It's partially influenced by the 1970 Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr movie The Magic Christian, which is about a rich guy who sets up all these bizarre psychodramas to make a point and change the world. So I wanted to play with that concept: What would you do if you were a rich person and decided to do the right thing with your riches? I'm filtering that corporate approach through Batman to see what we get.

Wired.com:Iron Man is popularly regarded as the first quintessentially capitalist superhero, and the egotistical film Iron Man 2 seems to be successfully backing up that claim. But Bruce Wayne was a billionaire capitalist decades before him.

Morrison: The way I see it is that Batman is a lot more Protestant. He doesn't drink; he's a pretty straight-edge guy. Tony Stark is a real playboy, which makes him dangerous and easier to corrupt. Bruce Wayne is much more disciplined in his approach to the world. But there is a little Tony Stark in him, because everyone wants to be a billionaire.

Wired.com: Does that cultural development concern you, where our superheroes are openly capitalist playboys who throw aside Batman's Protestant work ethic?

Morrison: I think it's natural. Superheroes have always been about becoming whatever we've needed them to be at any given time. Lately, we've made them like Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's The Ultimates, weaponized supersoldiers working for the military-industrial complex, which then grew into Iron Man, who is a superhero celebrity, an everyone-is-a-star kind of thing. But give it another five years and it could be cosmic seekers again, because of the new drugs coming onto the market. Or it could be something else entirely. They'll take the form of whatever our dreams or ideals happen to be.

Wired.com: Are you personally hungry for the cosmic seekers?

Morrison: Oh yeah. And I'm interested in Bruce Wayne as the Zen billionaire in Batman, Inc.. He's a superb martial artist, a trained meditator who's very intelligent. So I think he will help provide us a new way out. Although he does have fun hanging out with women who wear fetish clothes, like Catwoman (above).

Wired.com: It seems like the goal of franchising Batman as the Zen billionaire is to separate him from Bruce Wayne, so that he can be inhabited by anyone who consumes him across media.

Morrison: Absolutely. You're onto something there. One of the things I wanted to do was capture the feeling of the Batman: Arkham Asylum game that came out in 2009. When I played that game, it was the first time in my life where I actually felt what it is like to be Batman. It was very involving. The way the game and Paul Dini's story was created, crafted and shot made you actually feel like Batman.

Morrison: People don't want to pay money to watch some guy pretending to be someone else when they could be doing it themselves. In games, anyone can be a superhero or a soldier, and the gaming experience doesn't follow strict narrative rules. You can do things on your own, and move in directions you choose. So I wanted to follow that concept: We are now the heroes, and we can look through their eyes.

Wired.com: That cultural development has really blossomed. The humans want to be superheroes and the superheroes want to be human.

Morrison: Yeah, it's kind of weird, like Michelangelo having God touch Adam's finger on the Sistine Chapel. Superheroes are trying to break the boundaries of the page and screen, while we're all trying to get inside. A whole thesis could be written on this: The collapse of fantasy and reality in the last decade. And I think this is part of it. Look at Facebook pages: Everyone is a hero or star in their own story, and the inevitable next step is to become superheroic.

Morrison: Look at the technology we use. We're cyborgs. We're attached to our phones at ever-younger ages, while the phones have evolved forward. Most people don't even have short-term memories anymore. We're becoming machine people. I think superheroes are part of the vision of what we may become: Individuals with our own chest emblems. Something is going on there, a strange collapse. Like you said, more and more people want to become superheroes, even as comic-book writers and filmmakers have spent the last 10 years trying to make superheroes much more real, relatable and convincing.

Wired.com: That can get complicated, once superheroes, or the individuals that want to be them, decide to become their own corporations. Corporate personhood has been consistently, and controversially, expanded to include traditionally human civil liberties, which is a weird evolution.

Morrison: I suppose, because most corporations seem pretty demonic. Corporations as entities are strange things. Because no one person is really in charge, we've conjured some predatory, ravenous entities. But Batman, Inc. is an attempt to reimagine what a good corporation can be. It's not the first time this has happened in comics: Joe Casey tried to imagine the same thing with Wildcats. But this will be Bruce Wayne's attempt, and I think it's going to be quite progressive.

Wired.com: I read that aside from Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman, Inc. was also influenced by Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which is delightfully subversive cartoon. Do you think toons like that get a bad rap? They're wrapped in kids' packaging, but function on multiple levels.

Morrison: I agree. That has been one of my favorite Batman versions for years. I think it was great to step away from what Christopher Nolan was doing with The Dark Knight, and give Batman back to the realm of fantasy. Beyond that, I think there's some great psychedelic work in Batman: The Brave and the Bold. The dialog is good; the stories are really put together well. It's a great show that should be on at 9 .p.m. in the evening somewhere. I'd much rather watch Batman: The Brave and the Bold than Glee.

Wired.com: Speaking of pushing the expectations envelope, do you think audiences are ready for superhero films that are more challenging? I think your apocalyptic series Final Crisis (pictured above) would make a great candidate.

Morrison: Yeah, I think audiences are ready. Unfortunately, I don't think there's anyone in Hollywood who could drum up the $300 million it would take to make that one. But entertainment has changed, again. We've been concerned with realism for a while, but we're getting back into psychedelia and fantasy again. Look at James Cameron's Avatar or Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which are two of the most successful films of the last two years. Both happened to catch a wave that few were ready for.

Wired.com: Why do you think we're ready now?

Morrison: I think we want fantasy again. We want worlds we can get into. We want to be superheroes. I think the audience is ready for wilder stuff. But Hollywood is still mostly dealing in a conservative mind-set, so I can't imagine a Final Crisis film happening anytime within the next 100 years.